James Gleeson's points about landfills and climate change do no stand up to examination. He claims that landfills are a natural phenomenon, citing bogs and landslides as examples. Neither bogs nor landslides involve the burying of masses of toxic and volatile chemicals with all the resultant dangers and so the comparison is invalid. He cites Dr Antonio Zichichi's comments this year, saying that he pointed out that climate change is driven by natural phenomena. Dr Zichichi is not a climate scientist but has published a paper pointing out problems with current climate modelling. His paper is available online and contains the following, emphasised in bold text: "it is not possible to exclude that the observed phenomena may have natural causes. It may be that man has little or nothing to do with it." Even if Dr Zichichi is right (and all of the thousands of climate scientists are wrong), he is simply saying that their methods are wrong. His paper does not put forward any evidence that humans are not actually to blame. The claim that "Human activity has less than 10pc impact on environment" also comes from Dr Zichichi. Consider that a few thousand years ago there were vastly fewer humans on the planet and each one had a far smaller impact than humans today. So in the blink of the planet's eye we have gone from having almost zero impact to 10pc. This is an enormous, unprecedented change. It's hard to imagine how this could occur without a significant impact on the planet! Mr Gleeosn also cites Dr David Bellamy's stance on global warming. Dr Bellamy wrote to the Sunday Times on 2005 to say he had "decided to draw back from the debate on global warming". Before that he made incredible claims about the worlds glaciers in a letter to New Scientist. When Guardian journalist George Monbiot pressed him for his source material it turned out he'd seen the figures on a website run by a climate sceptic, who in turn could not provide any source for them. You can read the details at http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/05/10/junk-science/. The fact is that climate scientists are so sure about the human role in climate change that the UN IPCC has been able to get their conclusions accepted by countries such as the USA and Saudi Arabia who have a vested interest in business as usual. That just would not be possible if there was any serious doubt that we are to blame.
Update: Published with the Monbiot paragraph omitted.
Update: He wasn't happy with my reply so I had to reply again.
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